Jean Dufy was born in Le Havre in 1888, the seventh of eleven children. His father was an accountant in a metallurgy company as well as a talented amateur musician. We have very few visual and artistic tracks of Jean’s childhood in Le Havre, of his job as an itinerant clerk for an overseas import business, or of his stint as secretary on the transatlantic liner La Savoie, which linked Le Havre to New York.

1906

It was nonetheless during this period that the painter cultivated his artistic sensibility by strolling around the Le Havre port and reading Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud. He then discovered Matisse, Derain, Marquet, and Picasso at the 1906 Le Havre exposition. Matisse’s Fenêtre ouverte à Collioure, with its dazzling light and violent, boisterous colors, showed Jean Dufy his true calling

1910-1912

After his military service from 1910 to 1912, Jean moved to Paris and grew acquainted with Derain, Braque, Picasso, and Apollinaire.

1914

In his first watercolors, which were shown at the Berthe Weill gallery in 1914, muted tones and somber browns, blues, and reds mingle with the hatching technique he inherited from Cézanne by way of his brother Raoul Dufy.

Jean was drafted shortly after this first exposition. This did not stop him from painting and drawing the flowers, horses, and landscapes he discovered in places like Val-d’Ajol, in the Vosges region, where he was given medical treatment upon returning from the war.

1916

In 1916, after briefly working with his brother for the textile painting studio of the famous Bianchini-Férier company in Lyon, Jean embarked upon what would become thirty years of decorating porcelain for Théodore Haviland in Limoges.

1920

Back in Paris in 1920, Jean settled into Montmartre, where Georges Braque was his neighbor. Amid this intense atmosphere of artistic ebullience, the artist’s knack for working with color became apparent through his use of patchworks of colorful squares and bold distributions of light.

Successive expositions in Paris (Salon d’Automne at the Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées in 1920, 1923, 1924, 1927, and 1932, Galerie Bing in 1929) and New York (Balzac Galleries in 1930, Perls Galleries in 1938) put Jean in the public eye for the first time.

1925

Wins a gold medal at the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts for the “Châteaux de France”set.

Two events in the postwar Parisian cultural scene decisively affected the artist’s career: the comedy Le Bœuf sur le toit, in 1920, which gave him the chance to meet the great French musicians of the era (Darius Millaud, Georges Auric, Erik Satie, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger); and La Revue Nègre, in 1925, which crystallized the marriage of color and music in his paintings that would lead to exceptional works of art. Jean’s interest in music inspired many depictions of pianists and orchestras, awash with analogous color schemes. Heads of musicians are drawn like whole notes on a staff, organ pipes are aligned like eighth notes, and harps are placed to evoke quarter rests. During the same period, Jean also paid homage to the Fratellini brothers in paintings of circuses and clowns that teem with the music and language of color, plays of light, and a penchant for the liberal use of white, usually for clowns, horses, and athletes.

1930

Over the following years, Jean’s stays in Le Havre gave rise to majestic works such as Le quai Videcoq au Havre (1929), which features a perfect harmony of colors. Honfleur, his mother’s birthplace, Villefranche-sur-Mer, which he began visiting in 1920, and the Limousin and Touraine regions, where he lived with his wife for part of the year, inspired other highlights of his oeuvre, featuring views of forests, valleys, and the Château du Lion, for example.

1937

For the 1937 World’s Fair, the general manager of CPDE (Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution de l’Electricité, the Paris electricity distribution company) asked Jean’s brother Raoul to decorate the electricity pavilion. Jean helped him create an enormous fresco celebrating electricity over a surface of 600 square meters.

1950-1960

Jean devoted the years between 1950 and 1960 to travel, mostly in Europe (Italy, Greece, England, Ireland, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal) and North Africa. But he remained loyal to Paris and only Paris for 35 years, part of a long tradition that includes his contemporaries Aragon, Hemingway, and Prévert, who described it, and Utrillo, Chagall, and Marquet, who painted it. In his oil paintings and watercolors, Jean Dufy chose to represent the city using a constantly evolving creative process dominated by a harmony of blue tones. For Jean, blue was an insatiable source of inspiration for the Gates of Paris, the streets, the horse-drawn carriages, the Eiffel Tower, the sky, and the Seine.

A well-known painter with frequent expositions in Paris (Galerie Barreiro, Galerie Jos. Hessel, Galerie Drouant-David, etc.) and the United States (the Georges de Braux Gallery in Philadelphia, James Vigeveno Galleries in Westwood Hills, and Hammer Galleries and the Chase Gallery in New York), with works displayed in the collections of the most prestigious museums in Europe and in the United States: the Musée national d'Art moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the Art Institute of Chicago and the MoMA in New York.

1964

Jean Dufy passed away on May 12, 1964, in La Boissière in the village of Boussay, two months after the death of his wife Ismérie.